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Peter had a plan.
The plan involved the little Italian place two blocks from MJ’s apartment, the one with the good bread and the not-completely-outrageous prices, a reservation he’d made under a fake sense of confidence exactly nine days in advance, and a carefully rehearsed opening line he had absolutely no intention of using because it sounded insane out loud.
The plan did not involve breaking into a cold sweat somewhere between the appetizer and the entree.
“You okay?” MJ asked, watching him with the narrow-eyed attention she leveled at things that didn’t add up. “You’ve gone kind of gray.”
“I’m great,” Peter said, which was a lie so immediate and so poorly executed that even he heard how bad it sounded. “Really good. This bread is really good.”
“You haven’t touched the bread.”
“I’m getting to it.”
He was not, in fact, getting to it, because getting to it would have required moving his arm in a way that didn’t feel like it belonged to someone else, and the restaurant had started doing a slow, unpleasant tilt sometime around the second breadstick that Peter was doing his level best to power through on the strength of pure denial.
“Peter.” MJ set down her fork. “You’re sweating. It’s sixty-two degrees in here.”
“Enhanced metabolism,” Peter said, which was his go-to lie for approximately everything, and which was landing about as well here as it usually did, meaning not at all.
“You used that excuse for why you ran hot during the blackout drill. I looked it up. That’s not actually how metabolism works.”
“...You looked it up?”
“I look up everything you tell me, Peter, that’s kind of my whole thing.” MJ leaned forward, dropping the deadpan for something closer to real concern. “You look like you’re about to pass out into the bread basket. Are you actually sick?”
And this was the part where Peter’s brain, apparently done running interference for the night, simply stopped generating plausible lies, right as a wave of dizziness rolled through him wrong enough that he had to grip the edge of the table.
“...Maybe a little,” he admitted, voice thinner than he meant it to be. “I thought it was just- I felt kind of off this morning, but I really wanted tonight to go well, so I figured I could just push through it and it’d be fine-”
“Peter Parker, are you telling me you came on a date with a fever because you didn’t want to cancel?”
“When you say it like that it sounds bad.”
“It is bad! That’s- okay, first of all, incredibly sweet in a deeply stupid way, and second of all, you need to not be sitting in a restaurant right now.” MJ was already flagging down the waiter, already pulling out her phone, moving through the crisis with the brisk efficiency Peter had come to associate specifically with her. “Do you have a fever? Actual fever, not enhanced-metabolism-nonsense fever?”
“I don’t know, probably? I feel like my skin doesn’t fit right.”
“That’s a fever.” She pressed the back of her hand to his forehead with a directness that would have been romantic under literally any other circumstance and was currently just alarming. “Okay, yep, you’re burning up. Why didn’t you say something before we left your apartment?”
“Because I’ve been planning this for three weeks and I really, really didn’t want to be the guy cancels a date he’s been planning for three weeks.”
“You’re going to be the guy who passed out at Bella Napoli if we don’t leave in the next two minutes, which is a significantly worse outcome, so I need you to reprioritize.” MJ was already scrolling through her phone. “Who do I call? May’s out of town this weekend, right?”
“Yeah, at the- the thing, with Happy, don’t call her, she’ll drive back the whole four hours and worry the entire time-”
“Then who?”
Peter, through the fog of fever and the specific mortification of the entire evening collapsing in real time, said the only name that made sense. “Mr. Stark. His number’s under ‘Tony’ in my phone, it’s the one with the-”
“Found it.” MJ was already dialing before Peter finished the sentence, which was either extremely efficient or extremely terrifying, possibly both.
“Peter, everything okay? Kind of in the middle of-”
“This isn’t Peter, this is MJ, and no, everything is not okay, your kid brought a fever to our date instead of telling anyone and now he looks like he’s about to fall face-first into a place of gnocchi."
There was a beat of silence on the line that Peter, even fever-addled, could practically hear Tony’s brain rearranging itself around.
“...I’m sorry, he did what?”
“He’s been sick all day, apparently, and decided the plan was to power through a date instead of saying literally anything to anyone. We’re at Bella Napoli, two blocks off Bleecker.”
“I’m five minutes out.”
“You don’t have to-” Peter started, weakly, and MJ shot him a look sharp enough to end the sentence right there.
Tony made it in four minutes, not five, and swept into the restaurant with the controlled urgency of someone who’d clearly broken at least one traffic law to get there, took one look at Peter – pale, sweating, listing slightly in the booth – and his expression did the thing it always did, fear smoothing itself instantly into competent, focused calm.
“Hey, bambino.” His hand found Peter’s forehead with practiced efficiency. “You are an absolute furnace. What number are we talking?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t check before I left.”
“Of course you didn’t.” Tony didn’t sound surprised so much as deeply, tiredly familiar with the pattern. He turned to MJ. “Thank you for calling. Seriously.”
“He tried to talk me out of it,” MJ said, “for the record. Said something about not wanting to worry you on a Friday night.”
“Did he.” Tony looked back at Peter, something exasperated and fond warring in his expression. “We’re gonna have another conversation about the ways you keep deciding my Friday nights are more important than your actual health, but that’s a conversation for when you’re not swaying in a booth. Come on. Let’s get you home.”
“I ruined the date,” Peter mumbled, as Tony got an arm under him, hauling him carefully upright. “I had a whole plan. I had a reservation for nine days.”
“You didn’t ruin anything,” MJ said, standing too, gathering up both their jackets with brisk efficiency. “You showed up sick because you didn’t want to disappoint me, which is objectively the most Peter Parker thing that’s ever happened, and also deeply unnecessary, because I would have one hundred percent rather rescheduled than watched you try to eat bread while dying. We’re doing this again next week. When you’re not, you know. Contagious and vertical-adjacent.”
“You’re not mad?”
“I’m annoyed you didn’t just tell me, which is different from mad. Go home. Drink the gross electrolyte stuff. Text me when you’re not dying anymore.” She pressed a quick kiss to his cheek, undeterred by the fever radiating off him. “And for the record – the bread was really good. We should come back when you can actually taste it.”
Tony got Peter into the car with the same careful efficiency he applied to every version of this exact scenario, buckling him in like he was something breakable, which, at the moment, wasn’t entirely inaccurate.
“For what it’s worth,” Tony said, pulling away from the curb, “MJ’s a keeper. Not every teenager’s girlfriend calls a superhero’s alter ego with that much confidence in a crisis.”
“She’s not wrong that I’m an idiot,” Peter mumbled, head lolling against the window. “I really thought I could just power through it.”
“You never can, and yet the theory persists.” Tony reached over without looking away from the road, pressing the back of his hand briefly to Peter’s forehead again, checking. “Next time you feel like garbage before a date, you call. Me, May, MJ, anybody. ‘I don’t want to disappoint someone’ is not a good enough reason to sweat through an appetizer course, Pete.”
“I know. I just wanted tonight to be normal. Like, a normal date, as a normal kid, none of the- the extra stuff.”
“I know you did.” Tony’s voice softened. “For what it’s worth, a normal kid still would’ve gotten sick tonight. The only unusual part is that you tried to argue with a fever instead of just admitting you had one. That part’s all you, no radioactive spider required.”
Peter let out a small, tired laugh, eyes already sliding shut against the cool glass of the window. “Thanks for coming to get me. Even though it was a Friday.”
“Every single time,” Tony said, quiet and certain, the same promise he always made and always meant. “Fever or otherwise. Sleep, kid. I’ve got you.”